ICMLA 2019 – Boca Raton – Miami
Day 1 – 15 Dec 2019
Arriving at Boca Raton Wyndham hotel. Waking up at 5, sitting though the Piccadilly line, 9 hours flight to Detroit, customs, 3 hours flight to Fort Lauderdale, it’s been a very very long day. Then I got a bit sick…
Still, I insisted to walk around the city centre. Had a nice signature Zinburger with a pint of beer, while realising Boca Raton (mouth of mouse) is a resort town with big malls… Couldn’t go anywhere too without a car.
Day 2 - 16
Conference day 1, nothing too special. The first keynote talk on “broad learning” was full-house, not sure if I find it inspiring. “Increase variety of data source” is very general trend of the field.
I didn’t understand half of the posters in that first session. Talked to a guy from Madison about their toxicology prediction on 3D engineered brain tissue (essentially organoids). Quite a nice application, sadly there’s no interpretability which makes it almost impossible to publish in toxicology journals.
Day 3 - 17
Conference day 2, another day with most presentations on something not to relevant to me or I don’t understand. Well, except that one LSTM CRISPR array prediction, but these arrays should be predictable by rule(gene structure)-based sequence scoring, is this overcomplicating the problem?
The evening banquet was much better. Met 3 Flemish Belgians who work on machine vision (Timothy), a bioinformatician from Colorado (Asish) and a Nigerian Canadian who works on edge computing for anomaly detection (Okwu…). Food was very American, big fried chicken fillet, beef, potato and lettuce salad etc. The talk was on academia industry engagement and their successful story, quite nice but I can’t remember the details.
Day 4 - 18
Conference day 3, finally some application in health talks but 2 people didn’t show up in that session… Most are CNN or straightforward application with specific datasets, interesting but not very inspiring.
The poster presentation session (1830-2100) was quite a success! Unexpectedly, about 8-9 people came by and talked, surprisingly only 3 male? Most stayed for 10 mins, perhaps because I talked slowly. The neighbour Michael was a cool German lad, just started PhD like me, substituting his colleague to present a project he didn’t work on (radar Doppler prediction of gesture)… Most people had a health background, 1 lady worked with KGs, another lady on graph NNs. An Amazon guy (Mohammed Khalilia) who works on something very similar was quite interested. A lady from the radar field was so kind and listened through my talk… The last chat was with the lady presenting childhood obesity forecast learning from Pennsylvania Children’s Hospital EHR data, that was at least 30 mins and everybody has left the room before us… Almost gave her a lecture on KG and shared data source info with her, it was fun though.
Day 5 - 19
Final day of conference, listened to AWS Comprehend Medicine and transfer learning talk, drug hypergraph, NLP++, “learning trees (for beginners)”, Timothy’s low-resolution CCTV human detection, his postdoc’s diamond re-ID.
At the feedback session, so many people complained about the bad programme booklet design…
Walked past Laspada Hoagies several times, so I decided to have this as the farewell dinner. Cheap and authentic, Italian special hoagies with onion and tomatoes, swiss cheese, salt and pepper only. Small is 8 inches, very American, a good one.
Day 6 - 20
The morning was ruined by many failed attempts to call an Uber… Instead, I took hotel transport to Trirail station, took trirail (the train is so tall!), changed to Metrorail, arrived at Brickell. Hampton Inn & Suites by Hilton Miami Downtown Brickell is just across the road. The hotel logged my first name as Heng Chung…
Saw Burger King Impossible Whopper ad on TV, there’s a shop nearby, so I decided to have that as late lunch. It’s true, the vegetarian meat really tasted like meat, with a slight veggie twist aftertaste, even better.
Took metromover (so small so cute and free!?) and bus to Wynwood. Toured at Wynwood walls, very nice wall art and graffiti, I’m impressed.
Had alligator strips, a waffle burger and a glass of craft beer at Kush as dinner. Alligator tasted like very soft and fatty pork at first, then melts into fish. Can’t remember the last time I tried this at Australia, too long ago. No Eva, it doesn’t taste like chicken! Oh yes, I noticed roaming roosters for the first time.
At the hotel, I watched Miami Heat beat New York Knickers, a match that happened at Miami Downtown.
Day 7 - 21
Cloudy, windy day with occasional showers. Woke up at 6am to get picked up at 715 for Key West! Cayo Hueso, Bone Key (not actual west…), was a communal carcase disposal key of native Indians who fought for their homeland, sad story. Very long road journey but going through 44 bridges, Atlantic on the left and Mexican Gulf on the right with no land elevation was quite a spectacle, when I’m not the driver. Sad thing snorkelling was cancelled due to strong winds, but switching to jet skiing was my best decision!
First thing off bus was hopping on the van to Cow Key for jet skiing. Guide called Angel, didn’t realise it’s a male name, said that was real life Baywatch… So much fun speeding at 30-40+ mph, all wet and soaring thighs but the adrenaline rush and stormy feeling was invaluable. Didn’t plan this at all, I love surprises like this in life.
Soaking in salt solution the entire day, I enjoyed Conch Fritters (American conch takoyaki) and Key Lime Pie (juicy and very sour lemon cake) with a pint of local fruity ale. A nice walk down to the overcrowded and overrated monument of Southernmost Point of Continental US… Every building was so squared with front and side porches, American style. Soooo many noisy roosters and even baby roaming the streets, competing with pigeons and seagulls for food!
Journey back was quite creepy, no lights but could hear waves and strong winds whistling, with the fact that the bus was on bridges. Imagine playing a balancing game across the signature seven mile bridge.
Had a shrimp taco as a late-night light dinner before finally washing off the oceanic smell.
Day 8 – 22
Another gloomy day. Uber fixed my account so I can finally use my Uber cash on my ride to Miami Beach. Strolling down Lincoln Street at 10am the Sunday Market stalls hadn’t opened yet, so I went all the way down to the 16 km south beach. Finally, a proper beach, sadly, on a grey London-ish day. The windy part was great though, always loved sea “breezes”. The beach walk gradually transitioned from watching waves, feeling sand to watching humans to studying washed up things (like my favourite long-spine porcupinefish, translucent jelly-like blobs (salp?), Portuguese man-o-war, corals) to picking up shells. Taking pictures of birds was the only consistent activity. That was 2 hours of good time.
Going back to the Lincoln Street now it’s much more crowded with more stalls, mainly selling huge cups of summer fruits. Didn’t find confitures as suggested online, disappointed. Had McDonald’s for lunch, bacon cheese quarter pounder with Americano, to honour the American culture.
As I enjoyed the delicate French Fries, I calculated the risk of calling a one-way Uber to the middle of nowhere (Everglades National Park) 30 miles away from civilisation to witness the beauty of an alligator I devoured the other day. This was an activity highly recommended by Timothy at the Banquet. Eventually, I felt lucky and adventurous, so after liberating myself at the majestic building with a “14th Street” printed on top (public restroom), I called an Uber to exile me to a deserted land (no Internet). That driver accepted the mission in no time. I bet he struggled morally throughout the 50 mins drive. I can tell when he dropped me off at the “road closed” construction site in the middle of the highway with no Internet. In his eyes he was showing empathy to his mysterious passenger, silently questioning if this human is about to disappear and he’s the executioner. Well, I showed confidence and said goodbye while wishing him a good day. I paid him 15% tips before internet went off.
The meeting point was at the ValuJet Flight 592 crash memorial. At a place like this, I believe not many has stopped by, so the first thing I did was to send a little prayer to the 110 lost souls. God bless, RIP. Turning around, I sent another prayer for myself. I opened my umbrella to shield myself from looking more miserable. That doesn’t look like a place for any activities at all. But still, there was an amateur fisher, so I asked him. He asked me to ask the construction worker in the van, who knew nothing. Then a Miccosukee police magically appeared behind me in his truck, who very kindly drove me to the meeting point a mile behind where I was, away from the highway. The place was even less like anything would ever happen there, apart from the man in an Everglades t-shirt and some cars parked at the side.
The airboat ride was surprisingly great, specifically when we drift through masses of sawgrass. Everyone thought those parts were solid grassland, not a big river with grass growing out to cover most of the surface. We saw a baby male alligator, some birds including purple gallinules.
The return trip was somehow very smooth, thanks to a Japanese man Funa (?) (student of network, signal, communication at a signal school near Tokyo, Kanagawa?) who drove me all the way back to Miami Bayside market in a rented Jaguar Gtr. Nice thing I still have some Japanese in me.
Had a walk at the crowded market, then enjoyed a seafood dinner at Buppa Gump. Buttery shrimp stuffed in crab meat, served with rice and garlic bread. And a mango mojito.
Day 9 - 23
The only sunny day in my Miami trip had to be the last one. There was time until the 15:30 flight and checking out at noon, so after a big breakfast with cheese omelettes, bacon, oatmeal, cheese slice, ham, salami and fruit, I did a quick walk through the Brickell Downtown to the Miami River. There I witnessed the opening of the Brickell Avenue Bridge, a bascule bridge that gates the entry to the river from Miami South Channel and the Biscayne Bay.
The flight was delayed to 16:36 so I had to take a later (23:00) transit flight from New York JFK airport. That gave me another 3 hours to have a Shake Shack Shroom burger with cheese fries. That concludes my South Florida trip!
